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New research on intellectual property from Harvard Business School faculty on issues including copyright abuse, patent law, and the impact of property rights on investment and revenue.
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Financial Distancing: How Venture Capital Follows the Economy Down and Curtails Innovation

by Sabrina T. Howell, Josh Lerner, Ramana Nanda, and Richard Townsend

Common wisdom holds that VC investment and VC-backed startups are relatively insulated from downturns. This study shows that the relative quantity and quality of innovation declines more for VC-backed firms than for other types of firms during downturns.

What We Learned from Reading Jeff Bezos’ Patents

by Tricia Gregg and Boris Groysberg

By studying Jeff Bezos' personal patent records, Tricia Gregg and Boris Groysberg offer a unique glimpse into Amazon's strategy. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Tech Clusters

by William R. Kerr and Frederic Robert-Nicoud

We are witnessing a major transformation of business to achieve strategic positions in powerful tech hubs, but most workers and consumers will always be far away. The authors describe the spatial concentration of tech activity in the United States and explore the economics of tech clusters with an eye to the future of innovation and economic geography.

Do National Security Secrets Hold Back National Innovation?

by Kristen Senz

It's a paradox about innovation. Inventors want to keep secret the inner workings of their most commercial technologies, while technological progress relies on transparency. Daniel Gross looks to the secrets of WW II for insights. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Migrant Inventors and the Technological Advantage of Nations

by Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury, and Hillel Rapoport

This study provides robust econometric evidence for how immigrant inventors shape the innovation dynamics of their receiving countries. Countries receiving inventors from other nations that specialize in patenting particular technologies are more likely to have a significant increase in patent applications of the same technology.

Trade Secrets Protection and Antitakeover Provisions

by Aiyesha Dey and Joshua White

The study examines managers’ responses when facing an increased threat of their firm being acquired. Results add to our knowledge of the use of antitakeover provisions, showing that managers, particularly in high-innovation firms, increase certain provisions to protect long-term innovation output in the presence of elevated acquisition risk.

The Consequences of Invention Secrecy: Evidence from the USPTO Patent Secrecy Program in World War II

by Daniel P. Gross

Information plays a critical role in technological progress, yet many inventors opt for trade secrecy to protect their intellectual property. This paper studies the myriad repercussions of concealing new inventions through the lens of a systematic and sweeping invention secrecy policy implemented by the USPTO during World War II.

Infringing Use as a Path to Legal Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment

by Hong Luo and Julie Holland Mortimer

Copyright infringement may result from frictions preventing legal consumption, but also reveals demand. This study quantifies the effects of providing more-suitable options and reducing search costs.

Some Facts of High-Tech Patenting

by Michael Webb, Nick Short, Nicholas Bloom, and Josh Lerner

This study details the growth of patenting in software, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and related technologies in the twenty-first century, and the continuing dominance of inventors in large US, Japanese, and Korean companies. Researchers still need to understand the impact of such trends on social welfare more generally.

Buying the Verdict

by Lauren H. Cohen and Umit G. Gurun

This paper documents systematic evidence that firms engage in specialized, locally targeted advertising when taken to a court trial in a given location. Policymakers should consider what impact such targeted advertising is having—and whether it is a desired impact—on juries and the judicial process more generally.

Why South Korea's Samsung Built the Only Outdoor Skating Rink in Texas

by Michael Blanding

New research by Lauren Cohen and Umit Gurun finds that when some companies are sued, they put their advertising dollars to work in unusual ways to influence local juries. Meet 'TiVo,' the championship steer. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Should Intellectual Property be Protected in International Trade?

by James Heskett

SUMMING UP To do business in China, American firms often lose some of their intellectual property. James Heskett's readers think that price is too high. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

The Use and Misuse of Patent Data: Issues for Corporate Finance and Beyond

by Josh Lerner and Amit Seru

Corporate finance researchers who analyze patent data are at risk of making highly predictable errors. The problem arises from dramatic changes in the direction and location of technological innovation (and patenting practice) over recent decades. This paper explains the pitfalls and suggests practical steps for avoiding them.

Patent Trolls and Small-Business Employment

by Ian Appel, Joan Farre-Mensa, and Elena Simintzi

Patent trolls are organizations that own patents but do not make or use the patented technology directly, instead using their patent portfolios to target firms with patent-infringement claims. This paper provides evidence that state anti-troll laws have had a net positive effect for small firms in high-tech industries. There is no significant effect for larger or non-high-tech firms.

Capturing Value from IP in a Global Environment

by Juan Alcácer, Karin Beukel, and Bruno Cassiman

Challenges to capturing value from know-how and reputation through the use of different IP tools is an increasingly important matter of strategy for global enterprises. They will need to combine different institutional, market, and non-market mechanisms, but the precise combination of tools will depend on local and regional institutional and market conditions.

Foreign Competition and Domestic Innovation: Evidence from US Patents

by David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon H. Hanson, Pian Shu and Gary Pisano

US firms in industries exposed to greater change in import competition from China have suffered worse growth in patenting and R&D spending than firms in industries exposed to less change in Chinese competition.

Challenging the Belief that Liability Laws Kill Medical Device Innovation

by Michael Blanding

Many policymakers believe liability laws need reforming so that medical device makers are free to innovate without threat of costly lawsuits. But new research by Hong Luo and Alberto Galasso suggests innovation is not thwarted—just rechanneled. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Intellectual Property Rights Protection, Ownership, and Innovation: Evidence from China

by Lily Fang, Josh Lerner, and Chaopeng Wu

As China’s top leaders promote innovation as the key to the country’s sustained economic growth, the extent to which the state can drive innovation without sound institutions and economic incentives remains in question. The evidence in this study of innovation and intellectual property rights (IPR) protection strongly supports the view that effective economic institutions matter, even in China. In order to successfully transition the country from a development model dependent on cheap labor and physical investments to one that is innovation-driven, these results suggest that the role of the private sector will be crucial. Private firms are more innovative both in terms of quantity and quality of patents, and are more so in cities with strong IPR protection.

Innovation Network

by Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit, and William Kerr

Despite recent advances that measure how the technological development processes in innovative fields link with each other, our understanding of how progress in one technological area links to prior advances in upstream technological fields has been limited. The authors’ analysis and mapping of 1.8 million U.S. patents and their citation properties shows that a stable innovation network acts as a conduit for a cumulative process of technological and scientific progress. Upstream technological developments play an important role in the future pace and direction of patenting in downstream fields. This finding implies that if R&D slackens in one period the effects will still be felt years later in downstream fields.

Patent Disclosures and Standard-Setting

by Josh Lerner, Haris Tabakovic, and Jean Tirole

Technological standards are a central component of the modern network economy. Standard setting organizations (SSOs) play a variety of roles. One of the most important is ensuring the disclosure of relevant intellectual property—in particular, potentially essential patents—prior to the key decisions about a proposed standard. This study finds that large downstream firms are more likely to make generic disclosures to SSOs. Higher quality patents are more likely to be disclosed via specific disclosures.